Over the past two weeks, nothing has been bigger in college sports than Deion Sanders and the Colorado Buffaloes.
College football fans and celebrities from sports media, hip hop and entertainment have all flocked to Boulder to take part in and support the Deion Sanders experience, something athletic director Rick George envisioned when he first hired Sanders last December.
Yet even George could not have predicted the Tsunami of success Coach Prime has generated for the program, university and city.
In three short weeks, Sanders has dominated the ratings for Fox Sports and ESPN, proving his worth on a weekly basis.
It all began with the Buffaloes’ upset of then-17th-ranked TCU on the road to officially open the college football season. That game was watched by almost 7.3 million people, setting a record for Fox as its most-watched Week 1 Big Noon Saturday game in history.
Coach Prime followed that up with a “personal” 36-14 dismantling of Matt Rhule’s Nebraska Cornhuskers, a game that attracted 8.73 million viewers, making it, according to Deadline, “Fox’s best Pac-12 regular season game ever.” It also became the 10th most-watched college football game in Fox Sports’ history.
While we await the ratings from this past weekend’s thrilling 2 OT win over in-state rival Colorado State, there’s no more doubting Deion’s star power. And there should be no more disbelievers in what Deion says and does, for he’s proved it over three years between three seasons at Jackson State and 9 months at Colorado.
But Deion has done something else that wasn’t, or couldn’t be, predicted when he first took the job.
Coach Prime has brought back Thursday night as “Must See TV” for Black people nationally, only this time it’s on Saturday.
In the 80s, Black households would tune into NBC to watch The Cosby Show and A Different World as a family. In the 90s, the channel of choice became Fox for In Living Color, Martin, Living Single and New York Undercover.
Those shows brought us together for they had cultural appeal, impact and significance.
The shows were inspirational, entertaining, funny and informative. They introduced a national audience to HBCUs and the gritty streets of New York City and they gave us humor that we wouldn’t and couldn’t get from Saturday Night Live.
We heard Jazz and Soul music played from Cliff Huxtable’s record collection and watched Hip Hop and R&B artists perform their hits at Natalie’s. And we saw fashion styles and trends, from Cliff’s sweaters to the urban attire of Karl Kani, FUBU and others on JC Williams and Eddie Torres.
Most importantly, these shows became a point of connection for us that created discussion and bonding. On Fridays, we would all talk about the most recent episode of a show and run out to buy the gear we saw Thursday night at places like VIMs, Wings and Jimmy Jazz. This was before the introduction of social media, when flyers, telephones, beepers and Skytel pagers were our generation’s forms of communication.
Last night, as I fought off exhaustion to watch Colorado’s victory at approximately 2:30am ET, it reminded me of those times.
Those were times when my parents and brothers would all sit in the living room to watch the Huxtables. Those were times when my friends and I would rush out of work or the gym to make it home by 8pm to watch the next two hours on Fox.
Last night was a similar and familiar time as we all watched the Centennial Cup on ESPN together as a virtual family while talking about it with other members of Black Twitter/X.
Black America checked in from NY, the DMV, Baltimore, Chicago, Atlanta, Houston and LA to share memes, disgust over the illegal hit that ended Travis Hunter’s night and our fight to stay awake as the game rolled on.
But we watched it as a family, something that’s very rare during a college football game
It happened in boxing when prime Mike Tyson and Floyd Mayweather fought. We even witnessed it during the recent Spence vs Crawford fight. And it always happens during the NBA Finals and the Super Bowl.
But for that type of “family” gathering to occur during a Colorado vs Colorado St. game demonstrates the true cultural impact that Deion Sanders has made in the sport and in our living rooms.
Before Deion’s arrival, we’re positive Black people never considered Boulder as a destination. Yet now it is thanks to one man.
Who else could bring out The Rock, Stephen A. Smith, Shannon Sharpe, Offset, Master P, Kawhi Leonard, Lil Wayne, Chauncey Billups and Kyle Lowry to a location as foreign to Black people as Iceland?
To be fair, he did accomplish something similar during his tenure at Jackson St., but many couldn’t see the games as they weren’t broadcast on national television.
But now that he’s in the FBS, has taken a 1-11 team to 3-0 in three consecutive nationally broadcast games, become the main reason for the program’s return to the Big 12 next season, and brought both national attention and a loyal Black audience to Boulder, he’s surpassed his success in Mississippi.
Deion has revived a feeling of family on TV again, something we haven’t truly experienced to this magnitude in sports. It’s something akin to the heyday of Black television in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
Whether you love him or hate him, Deion Sanders has done something that no one has in college football, and for that one reason alone you should believe in him and what’s he building.
Most significantly, he’s made Saturdays a day for Black families to come together and enjoy each other’s company once again.
So with that in mind, I’ll “see” you all next Saturday at 3:30pm in Oregon.
